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Because if men aren’t front and center, that means it’s not important.

Yesterday, the editorial board of Columbia University’s student newspaper announced that it supports the “gender-neutral approach” being implemented this year at Columbia’s annual Take Back the Night march. Previously, the march organizers had a policy of allowing only women at the front of the march, acknowledging that women-only space for rape victims was important because of the traumatic nature of rape and the fact that almost all rapes are perpetrated by men on female victims. TBTN organizers had previously stated that

[t]he women’s space was created to ensure that female survivors, co-survivors, and allies could participate without feeling afraid, intimidated, or triggered in a co-gendered environment.

And indeed, the editorial board of the Spectator acknowledges that this reasoning is sound:

the presence of men at the front could possibly be traumatic and be a barrier in creating a safe space for the rape survivors.

We understand the reasoning behind this approach. As TBTN’s recent press release stated, a significantly higher percentage of perpetrators of sexual assault are male. Having women at the front of the march can be a visual symbol for rape’s gendered status. Moreover, while we cannot claim to fully grasp the psychology of rape, we understand that the trauma of some female rape survivors with male perpetrators—who constitute the majority of rape victims—can lead them to feeling threatened and emotionally unsafe in the presence of men.

Could they be more patronizing at the end there? I don’t think so. As academented, overly educated babies, none of which have apparently been raped themselves, they cannot fully grasp the psychology of rape — psychology is important, you see. As a patriarchal, pseudo-medical academic field, psychology is key to our understanding of the world, and key to our understanding of rape — not listening to rape survivors, who say that having men at the front of the march is triggering and intimidating. The editorial board at the Spectator might easily avail themselves of some learning on the issue however, if they wanted to, being at a major university and all. Lots of books there, although who knows what those books would actually say. About the psychology. Of rape.

And while the editorial board of the Spectator understand why female rape victims might feel threatened and emotionally unsafe in the presence of men, they simply don’t care.

Why?

Because gender. Yes! The editorial board at the Spectator apparently cannot tell the difference between sex and gender:

sexual assault is not just a women’s issue. Gender identity does not define who rapes or is raped. Men can be rape survivors, women can be perpetrators—and wherever oppression exists, sexual or otherwise, it is everyone’s issue. Having men at the front of the march can help illustrate that this issue transcends gender. Additionally, when some of the students who will be a valuable part of the march identify as transgender or reject gender identifications, it can become problematic to enforce a rule among gender lines. A gender-neutral approach is the only way for the march to be all-inclusive. By including more than just women at the front, TBTN is showing the many faces of rape survivors and allies in the community. As a show of inclusivity and solidarity, it can only strengthen the cause.

Rape is an issue that transcends gender alright: trans men are in danger of being raped and impregnated by men, and this is due entirely to their sex — they are female — and nothing to do with their gender at all. So opening up the front of the march to all FAABs including trans men would indeed show that rape transcends gender — but of course, this is not what the Columbia Spectator or the organizers of this year’s TBTN have in mind.

No, the Columbia Spectator and the organizers of TBTN are trying to tell us that rape — and specifically stranger rape — transcends sex, but of course that is not true. In fact, TBTN was specifically created to address the problem of male-on-female stranger rape, and women’s reasonable fear of that, where women were and are not free to walk the streets at night without fearing for their safety and their lives.

A woman walks alone down a dark, deserted street. With every shadow she sees, and every sound she hears, her pounding heart flutters and skips a beat. She hurries her pace as she sees her destination become closer. She is almost there. She reaches the front door, goes inside, collects herself, and moves on forgetting, at least for tonight, the gripping fear that momentarily enveloped her life. This scene could have occurred anywhere last night, last year, or even 100 years ago. Historically, women faced the anxiety of walking alone at night and that is why Take Back the Night began.

That is the history of TBTN. TBTN was never meant to address the problem of “unwanted sex” as such, it was specifically designed to combat rape, that overtly political, interpersonal, biological and social oppression that male-bodied persons routinely visit on female-bodied persons cross-culturally and around the globe. Rape, where the victim often feels — and is given every reason in the world to believe — that she will be killed after her rapist penetrates her with his penis and ejaculates into her vagina. That she will never see her family again. That her children will be left without a mother, because she was raped and murdered by a man.

And where female rape victims are left to agonize for weeks — if they survive — whether they have been impregnated against their wills; and where they must live with the knowing that it could happen again. Because women are members of the rapeable class, and being raped once does not mean that it won’t happen again, and again, and again.

Men never have to deal with these consequences in their own lives, no matter what has happened to them, or who did it and why. No. These are the realities of rape, for female-bodied persons. And men deliver these consequences onto women by raping us.

Placing men and men’s concerns literally front and center at TBTN is ahistorical, acontextual, and the organizers know it will be damaging to women — and the editorial board of the Spectator and the organizers of this year’s TBTN are demonstrating that they do not care. That it will be damaging to women alone should be reason enough to not do it, but the truth is that there are other options that are apparently not even being explored; damaging women and disrupting women-only space is the first resort here, when it could be made the last resort — it could, if anyone cared even that much. But they don’t.

Whoever believes there is a need, could encourage male crime victims to start their own movement, instead of leaching off of the women who started and continued TBTN for themselves and for other women because men can’t seem to stop raping us. Let male victims start their own movement if it’s so important to them: let them amass their numbers in public and demand the kinds of change they want and need.

But do not let men — overwhelmingly the perpetrators of rape against both male and female victims — march in the front of, or take over, Take Back the Night. And definitely don’t do it because gender. That argument simply and obviously doesn’t hold any water at all.

Rape does not transcend sex. Rape is the use of sex and its attendant reproductive consequences as a tool of political oppression by men against women. Putting men literally front and center at this year’s TBTN is wrong.

Today, the Baltimore Sun reports that a 31-year old Washington man has been arrested in Maryland after “pimping out” a 15-year old girl. The girl had apparently gone missing from her Virginia home last September, and had been used as a “prostitute” between September 2011 and February 2012. However, because the girl was a minor under the age of consent in Maryland, which is generally 16, even if he wasn’t pimping her out, anyone having intercourse with her (unless the perpetrator was less than 4 years older than she was) would still be guilty of a sexual offense. In effect, regardless of any additional crime related to prostituting or soliciting prostituted women, intercourse in this context would be rape, not sex.

So, what the Baltimore Sun is really saying here is that in its estimation, prostitution is prostitution is prostitution, whether it is the commodification of “sex” or the commodification of rape, or child-rape. Which implies, doesn’t it, that there is also no difference between (uncommodified, regular) sex and rape, and between sex and child-rape. Implicit in their treatment of the issue, the Baltimore Sun and its employees reveal their belief that sex and rape are the same thing. Which would lead one to question, does the Sun think that both sex and rape are bad? Or does it think that sex and rape, being indistinguishable from each other, are both good?

And throughout the publication, the Sun repeatedly makes its belief that sex and rape are the same thing clear. Recently, the Sun reported that a 26-year old man was arrested for attempting to solicit a 14-year old girl for “sex.” What the facts seem to indicate, however, is that the man was attempting to lure the girl via Facebook so that he could rape her, because a girl of 14 cannot legally consent to “sex” with a 26-year old man in the state of Maryland. The man wanted rape, not sex. But again, the Sun uses the headline “Police charge Parkton man for soliciting underage girl for sex” when they could’ve just as easily used the legal term for what this man attempted to do: he was charged with sexual solicitation of a minor and an attempted sex offense. Of course, even the legal terms here are essentially weasel words meaning sexualized violence, including degrees of rape, but the Sun wasn’t satisfied with mere legal weaseling; it needed to weasel more. Why, one might wonder, does the Baltimore Sun seem so intent on minimizing men’s sexual violence against young girls?

And again, just today, the Sun uses the headline “Baltimore jury convicts child sex offender,” referring to a man who “repeatedly attacked” a 10-year old girl. Sex? Really? Interestingly, according to the Sun article, that jury actually convicted the man of child sexual abuse, another euphemism for sexualized violence of course, but the Sun decided to report that the man was an “offender” instead of an “abuser.” Why? If it was going to choose a descriptor that differed from the official legal one, why did it choose “sex offender” instead of something else, like violent offender, violent criminal, sexual predator, danger to the community, pedophile, pervert, or something else? Utilizing a derivative of “sexual offense” here makes it sound like the man farted in bed, when in reality, it appears as if he repeatedly sexually assaulted a 10-year old girl. Why not just say it? It’s not that hard.

Or it shouldn’t be that hard, unless the Sun has a written or unwritten editorial policy or corporate culture which makes it impossible for reporters and editors to accurately report on men’s sexual violence against young girls. So what’s the deal with your biased reporting on child sexual abuse, Baltimore Sun? Inquiring minds want to know.

Recently, CNN reported that a 2-year old girl child was brought into a New Delhi hospital with life-threatening injuries, and the subsequent investigation unearthed evidence of a human trafficking ring involving girls and women being “sold into marriage”, “forced into prostitution”, “exploited”, “treated poorly”, and every creative euphemism one might reasonably (or unreasonably) imagine for the act of men raping girls and women, and men profiting from other men raping girls and women. Apparently, CNN is aware that the rape-word exists, because it says it once. One time.

One wonders whether their using the word at all has more to do with Google and keyword searches, than anything else, just in case the entire population hasn’t fully come around to Orwellian Newspeak yet and still Googles old-school style. Because as invested as CNN obviously is in propagandizing and normalizing rape, and not offending their male readership who both enjoy and benefit from it when rape is normalized, instead of called what it actually is, there’s also something to be gained (for CNN) from maximizing page hits. CNN knows on which side its bread is buttered, and in this case, its buttered on both sides.

“Sex-racket involving minors and child prostitution and sale of women for marriage” it is, then! That very exhausting euphemism brought to you by one Raaj Mangal Prasad, head of India’s Child Welfare Committee. CNN must’ve just loved printing that one. They couldn’t have downplayed the horror, and erased the human-trafficking and slavery aspects while sexing it up for its porn-tastic reader base any better themselves.

From the article:

Indians came to know of Baby Falak after a distraught teenage girl, only 14, brought the baby to the hospital, claiming to be her mother.

On the night of January 17, the baby just kept crying and crying, the teenager told the Child Welfare Committee in New Delhi. Angered by the tantrum, the girl slapped the baby three or four times — and bit her.

A while later, she said, the baby slipped on a wet bathroom floor and fell on her face. The girl tied a bandage around the baby’s head but the wound began to swell. The next day, when the baby did not wake up, the girl took her to the hospital.

The doctors said Baby Falak was bruised the color of eggplant and beets. She was in a coma. They did not believe the girl’s story. Nor that she was Falak’s biological mother.

“My personal opinion would be that it doesn’t look like a simple case of falling down,” said Dr. Deepak Agarwal, a neurosurgeon at the hospital.

She was referred to a juvenile center for counseling and police launched an investigation.

South Delhi deputy Police Commissioner Chhaya Sharma formed five teams to fan out across India to track down Falak’s real family.

What police learned in the subsequent weeks was shocking.

Shocking? Shocking to whom? Girls and women know what goes on in this world, and what men do. And boys and men know it too, because they are the ones perpetrating these atrocities and human-rights violations on girls and women. So who’s left to be shocked? I mean really. Everyone, and I mean everyone already knows about this stuff, so who are they trying to kid? This is a serious question.

In reality, it seems as if CNN is writing for the future. Or, you know, for aliens, the ones that are watching us right now and have reason to believe that dogs really own their masters, because who picks up whose shit, ay?

In true Orwellian Ministry of Truth style, CNN appears to be fudging history, in real time, for the benefit of their own archives, so that subsequent generations might be properly mislead about what has always happened, and what boys and men have always done to girls and women. So that these future-people will be completely without context within which to evaluate their own reality, where boys and men rape girls and women all the time, everywhere, and everyone is trying really hard to pretend that it’s just a matter of educating boys and men and cracking down on crime, and then everything will be better. Because they have no reliable history to show them how and why those strategies are so horribly, horribly wrong, and unlikely to fix anything, and history bears this out, that the only real solution is to keep boys and men as far away from girls and women as possible, because that’s just what boys and men do to girls and women and they will never stop.

What we are witnessing here, is the Ministry of Truth being expedient, and not making the mistake of printing the truth the first time around, so it needn’t be corrected later. It’s Orwell’s totalitarian propaganda machine, but on a budget. Of course, thanks to the internet, any “corrections” that need to be made can be done so very easily, and without killing any trees, which is nice.

“People in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name, though he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions — definitive texts, they were called — of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels — with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.”

CNN, what you are doing is wrong. Please stop. And no, you don’t get points for starting up your “Freedom Project to end Modern Day Slavery,” not really, not when you constantly, constantly use the words “sex” and “rape” interchangeably. That is just completely unforgivable. If and when you succeed in making it completely obvious to the discerning reader whether they’ve wandered into an online porn-shop or real, actual human-rights advocacy for girls and women, we’ll talk.

This week, about a thousand women and a few men protested outside the Virginia State Capitol against several bills which will soon be state law, attacking the constitutional right to abortion confirmed in the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade. On February 22 the Virginia Legislature delayed a final vote on the bill, which would require women in the eastern US state to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound prior to an abortion.

Critics say the proposed, intrusive Virginia procedure — involving an electronic probe inserted deep into the vagina — amounts to state-sanctioned rape, as neither a woman nor her doctor would be able to opt out of it.

Abortion is a constitutional right, encompassed in the”right to privacy” protected under the Due process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Male-dominated and dominating government has been attempting to crush this right ever since Roe, using the same tactics that were previously used by state governments to keep Black people from voting after their constitutional right to do so was established. The most well-known of those punitive laws were the literacy and property requirements placed on citizens. The state governments had a raft of non-discriminatory reasons why those new laws were suddenly needed. But the reasons were pretexts, as many court cases since have since established. The real reason was to prevent Black people from exercising their rights, as is widely acknowledged now.

The right to an abortion is specifically a woman’s right, and it is necessary and critical to women’s survival. Abortion, along with woman-controlled contraception, is the ultimate threat to male domination. As Riane Eisler said regarding the population explosion in her book The Chalice and the Blade, “The traditional means of stemming population growth have been disease, hunger, and war. Giving top priority to reproductive freedom and equality for women is the only other way to halt the population explosion. But to give these “women’s issues” top priority would mean the end of the present system. It would mean a transformation from a dominator to a partnership society. And to the androcratic mind – the mind of many of our world’s present leaders – this is not a possibility…the first policy priority in a male-dominated system has to be the preservation of male dominance. Hence, policies that would weaken male dominance – and most policies that offer any hope for the human future will – cannot be implemented.”

Just like the anti-voting laws passed to prevent Black voting, the reasons given for the trans-vaginal ultrasound requirement are pretexts. There is no medical need for such a procedure – the “need” is entirely political. It is said that women requesting abortions will receive information that will assist them in giving informed consent for the abortion – but what additional information does this procedure provide? The woman knows that she is pregnant, that she is a certain number of weeks along, and that the fetus is not viable outside the womb. What will the ultrasound tell her?

It will tell her nothing she doesn’t already know. Information is not the reason for use of this medical procedure for no medical reason. There is no study stating that use of such a procedure cause women to change their requests for abortions.

The real reason, of course, is that women are to be threatened with rape if they attempt to exercise a constitutional right.

This is what men and patriarchal institutions do to women, long after we have “won” our legal rights from them. Reformists, beware?

In almost all U.S. jurisdictions, the felony of “rape with a foreign object” is defined something like the California law: it is penetration of the vagina or anus with anything other than a penis, without consent, including penetration by hands and fingers as well as other body parts or objects.

Passing a law which requires state-sanctioned and enforced rape does not mean a woman can be said to have given her consent. In fact, under the typical California law, legal consent precludes “…the use of force, fear, threat, coercion…or abuse of authority.” In legal fact, the Virginia bill is an abuse of authority of the highest order. It requires physicians to commit a serious felony, and violates a federal constitutional right.

Such state-sanctioned serious crimes against women has occurred recently in another part of the world, in Egypt last year during the overthrow of the Mubarak regime. During the Tahrir Square protests, many women who joined the protests were arrested by Egyptian police and given “virginity tests”. The tests involved an inspection of a protester’s hymen, on the assumption that the hymen could only be torn as a result of sexual intercourse. The tests were performed under brutal and degrading circumstances.

Virginity testing is considered a violation of human rights by Amnesty International. Women who “failed” the tests were told they might be arrested for prostitution, which would ruin their lives.

The analogy is perfect: women are to be vaginally penetrated to shame, hurt, and intimidate them, and to prevent them from exercising their constitutional rights. Essentially, both groups are raped with official sanction.

The outraged women of Egypt went out and protested loudly about this. The women of Virginia stood mute on Monday. The obvious reason they stood mute is because they were frightened they would be beaten or arrested if they dared to open their mouths. Indeed, American women appear to be more frightened to dissent than the Egyptians are frightened of their brutal government. This is outrageous, and unacceptable, and indicates that American women are being brutalized and oppressed, even as everyone who matters waxes poetic about how American citizens in general are free, and American women, in particular, are lucky to have been born American. Okay, but lucky compared to whom? And, are we very sure about that?

Another analogy to the bill that is immediately obvious: an “alien probe” is to be inserted and moved around in a woman’s body against her will by hands in rubber gloves in a clinical setting. It’s a B-grade sick science-fiction sex fantasy dreamed up by men, and the women of Virginia need to stop being silent and tell the legislators to climb back into their saucers and get out while they still have jobs.

Today, liberal feminist activist Gloria Steinem co-writes for CNN that the use of sexualized violence against women by men during wartime is because gender.

In an article that is very difficult to criticize, because it addresses wartime rapes of women by men and this is hardly ever addressed by anyone, and it’s almost unprecedented to have anyone self-identifying as an actual feminist address sexualized violence (or anything) in the popular media, Steinem reports that she and another woman have started a project at the Women’s Media Center called “Women Under Siege”, an initiative on sexualized violence in conflict. They don’t say by whom these women are taken under siege, it’s just implied.

And because everyone knows that the only ones committing sexualized violence in conflict are men, the authors let everyone come to the correct conclusion on their own, but without ever having to actually say it. Now that’s good liberal-feminist politicking.

From the article:

We ran through a dozen [stories of raped women], and finally realized that it would be too difficult to find the right one — the tale that would express exactly how and in what ways sexualized violence is being used as a weapon of war to devastate women and tear apart communities around the world, conflict by conflict, from Libya to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Used as a weapon of war by whom? Again, they don’t say.

It is because of this complexity that we must understand how sexualized violence is being used. We must understand in order to stop it — just as, when seeking to defuse a bomb, it is crucial to know its components. Both the World Health Organization and the U.N. Security Council have recognized that there is a lack of research on the nature and extent of sexualized violence in conflict, even as there is increasing demand from U.N. bodies, donors, and others for better analysis to work toward prevention and healing.

All of this is why we have begun a new project at the Women’s Media Center that breaks down the specifics of sexualized violence into areas such as its motives and patterns, its fallout, and the gender and cultural attitudes that may have led to it. We’re calling our project Women Under Siege, because with four women being raped every five minutes in Congo alone, we can say it is nothing less than that — an ongoing siege. And it’s time we began to put an end to it.

And that’s commendable, it really is, and I know I’m going to hell for addressing the problems with this article. I know it! And if my criticism costs this project one penny of financial support, or one ounce of political support I will probably kill myself.

But they still haven’t named men as the agent of harm here, not one single time. In fact, this article uses the word “women” 17 times, and uses the word “men” 3 times. And check out the context of it, where the word “men” is used:

Sexualized violence may be the only form of violence in which the victim is blamed or is even said to have invited it. In war, rape shames women, men, children, entire societies. The stigma imposed on all who are touched by this violence makes this weapon incredibly effective as a means of destroying the enemy.

It’s okay to say “men” in the context of wartime rape if it’s necessary to convey how rape hurts men too.

Here’s another one:

But it is crucial to remember that it wasn’t always like this, nor does it have to be. Sexualized violence isn’t a “natural” part of conflict. For the first 90% or more of human history, females and males had roles that were balanced and porous. Our societal positions weren’t based on the domination of females by males. Humans and nature, women and men, were linked rather than ranked. The circle, not the hierarchy, was the organizing principle of our thinking.

It’s okay to say “men” in the context of wartime rape if it’s romanticising an unsourced account of pre-history where women and men were equals, and men didn’t rape women. And a footnote or two would be nice!

Here’s the third and last time the word “men” is used in this article:

Naming sexualized violence as a weapon of war makes it visible — and once visible, prosecutable. What happened to men in the past was political, but what happened to women was cultural. The political was public and could be changed; the other was private — even sacred — and could not or even should not be changed.

It’s okay to use the word “men” in the context of wartime rape if it’s calling attention to the problem of separate spheres, and where men are hurt too, but what happens to men is visible, whereas what happens to women is not. Again, who is causing all this harm to both women and men, and who ultimately benefits from separate spheres whereby men can damage women behind closed doors with impunity and they have been doing this for a long time, is never explicitly stated. And again, we can all get there on our own, and we are right, but Steinem never has to actually say it, and so never draws the ire of the men and male-identifed women she has pledged allegiance to, and depends on for support.

Steinem finishes the piece by stating unequivocally that wartime rapes happen because gender, and still doesn’t say it’s because sex, or because men, or because men rape women, and conspicuously ignores that men rape women in peacetime too, even though in the beginning of the article she describes the story of one woman who was repeatedly raped, shot, and left for dead, only to survive and return home 5 months pregnant. And even though the article specifically calls attention to the use of rape as a tool of genocide, where men use it to intentionally cause pregnancy in their victims.

She concludes,

Making clear that sexualized violence is political and public breaks down that wall. It acknowledges that sexualized violence does not need to happen. When masculinity is no longer defined by the possession and domination of women, when femininity is no longer about the absence of sexual experience or being owned, then we will have begun.

What the fuck is she talking about? “Femininity” isn’t what’s implicated here, when we are talking about women being owned by men. No, that’s what it means to be a woman under male supremacy. A Woman. A female-bodied person, not a feminine-gendered person. The way you can tell is that un-feminine women are owned and raped by men too. Jeebus.

A bit of liberal-feminist politicking, brought to you by liberal feminism’s Queen. She has started a worthy project here that deserves support, but the way she panders to men and men’s feelings, and toes the line of male-supremacist politicking and journalism is really pretty gross. And ultimately, and this is really the point, it’s very difficult to support male-supremacy and to effectively undermine it, at the same time. The laws of physics, among other things, prevent that from happening.